If you've ever found yourself on a mapping website looking for directions, there's a fair chance you've also found the street-view imagery button and then a few seconds later caught yourself peeking into the driveways of places you used to live.

Since 2007, Google has been collecting those views by driving a fleet of colorful vehicles around the world with a ball of cameras sitting on the roof atop a mast. But the company isn't stopping there.

Last year, it added a building-interiors view, utilizing photos supplied by participating businesses. Now the effort to map everything is moving to the great outdoors, and Steve Silverman, a Google project manager, is working on the newest model of image capture. In fact, Silverman is the newest model, strapping a 42-pound gadget to his back and trekking through places like the Grand Canyon with the same ball of cameras from the car floating over his head.

"People that can't get out of their living rooms or kids in Mexico can go and see the Eiffel Tower, and kids in France can go see the pyramids in Mexico," Silverman said of the project. "We want to inspire people to go to these places. So when you see a place you go, 'Oh, that's cool, I want to go there.' That's my reaction to maps."

Silverman lived in Orange County until he graduated from Villa Park High School in 1976 and left for college. He eventually earned his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering, working his way into companies such as Hughes Aircraft. At Hughes, he worked on tools and sensors for rovers that were shipped to Mars and, more recently, a camera used by SpaceX.

Silverman came to Google in 2010 to ruggedize the Street View car for extreme conditions and then turned his sights on Trekker, the newest human-driven version of the technology. He answered questions from the Register about those efforts.

Q. What's the big idea behind Street View and Trekker?

A. (Using Google's maps) you can fly in from space, you can go down and look at a rooftop, drop down onto the street, walk through a building with our indoor maps and walk out of the back of the building onto a trail. And it's all seamless.

Q. How many of these Trekkers are out there and how long have you been working on them?

A. I was brought on at Google to ruggedize the current version of the street-view car. The Trekker is very similar to that. We pulled that camera off the car, and we did all the engineering marvels you can do to take a very heavy system and lightweight it. Street View started in 2007, and these things were discussed nearly back at the beginning. It was before I joined Google. But over the last year and a half, we've turned this thing into production class and ruggedized it. They're basically all over the world. We generally don't give out the numbers, but I can share that we're just starting to ramp up.

Q. Where are you focusing and when might you get to Orange County?

A. We're concentrating on the southern parts of the United States and working our way up to the northern parts. We've been to mountains in Japan, beaches in Brazil, pyramids in Mexico and we've been to the Grand Canyon, which was our inaugural visit. So you can sort of extend that out and make a guess where we'll go next.

Where has the Street View Car been? A lot of streets. We're in 50 countries and 3,000-plus cities, 5 million unique miles. That's just with a car. But if you look at the world you're missing all those beautiful places like Laguna Beach, where you go out onto the beach. Nothing is insignificant. It's just we're going to start with the big places and then work ourselves into being more and more comprehensive.

We have a lot of permissions in Orange County and I know that it's on the map, but I don't know the details.

Q. What's it like to hike with?

A. It's not as light as it could be, but it's very functional. It's 42 pounds. It's about half of what an expedition backpack would be for most people. For every extra day you want to hike and collect data, you need about eight pounds of battery and drive. The Trekker runs on lithium ion batteries, and we write data to a 488-gigabyte drive, and we fill one of those up in about eight hours.

You can just walk at a normal pace. I kind of saunter back and forth. You can see that in the raw imagery, but when you see it published it all gets corrected out. The camera is capable of collecting up to about 20 miles an hour. A fast walking pace is 5 miles an hour. Typically we're walking about 2 miles an hour. You can wear this thing for a couple hours at a time, take a little break, then put it back on and keep going.

We look for people that are healthy. And after a few days walking with this, you're in better shape. It's kind of like carrying my 7-year-old daughter around except it doesn't squirm around as much.

Q. What other tech is inside the Trekker?

A. The image quality is identical between Street View cars and the Trekker. The camera geometry is identical. There are 15 five-megapixel cameras behind a custom low-flare lens. The Trekker knows where it is because of the GPS antenna system that's attached to it. And we also have three-axis gyros so we know the orientation. We also have the magnetometer and barometer, so we know the direction we're going and the altitude changes. Trekker is a very accurate positioning system and it does the same sort of thing we do with Street View – blurs faces, license plates.

Q. Where have you personally taken it?

A. (I was part of the) expeditions that went to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Some of us stayed near the top, so I did a lot of the south rim. And I also walked down into Meteor Crater, which is a park near the Grand Canyon, and I took the backpack down to the bottom. People aren't generally allowed to go to the bottom of Meteor Crater, so this was a chance to let everybody see what it's like to hike to the bottom. I also wore the backpack on the trips to Mexico and to Brazil.

Q. Is it different to map trails than it is to map streets?

A. What we use Trekker for is to show you where the places are and to give you a good idea of what it will be like when you get there. It's not intended to be the perfect backpacker's guide to the trail.

When I'm hiking I'm either looking at my feet to make sure I place my feet carefully or I'm looking in front of me. When I go back and look at these images there may have been a mountain goat that ran behind me, I missed it. But the Trekker didn't. What's cool is you go back and spin around and wherever the Trekker was you can look all directions. I find that really fun.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.